Doug
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"A Note on the Transfer of Power from Parties to Candidates"
BY: JOHN E. ROEMER
University of California at Davis
Paper ID: UC Davis Working Paper #97-23
Date: September 1997
Contact: Donna Wills Raymond
E-Mail: MAILTO:dwraymond at ucdavis.edu
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It is commonly held that power has been transferred from
political parties to candidates in the last fifty years,
and that television is the cause. This paper constructs a
game-theoretical model of political competition in which a
technological innovation, like television, can have this
effect. Political competition takes place between two teams,
each consisting of a party and its candidate. The party is
principal, the candidate, the agent. Each part have policy
preferences (it is Left or Right); candidates, however,
wish solely to maximize the probability of victory, net of
effort costs. Parties use campaign finance to motivate
candidates to expend effort. The party chooses a schedule
according to which it invests in the campaign as a function
of the policy the candidate announces. Equilibrium is Nash
equilibrium between parties, where the strategies are
schedules (functions) of campaign financing, where each
party is constrained by the actions its agent (the
candidate) will take.
A definition of power is proposed, and it is argued that
television has changed the model parameters in such a way
as to transfer power from parties to candidates.
JEL Classification: D72